I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting older and more cynical, or that I have less patience for incompetence and organizations acting in bad faith (ahem current U.S. politics), but this pisses me off and I told North Face as much.

Things have been getting under my skin more often lately. Maybe I need a vacation – I’ve been working overtime the past few months so I haven’t been able to relax and enjoy things. Or maybe the internet is full of stupid people who do stupid things that rile me up. Or both! It could very easily be both.

During the government shutdown I had to use up my paid time off and took 80 hours of leave without pay. Luckily a few months back my company was able to work out a deal with our contract so that we could earn back our paid time off (work 1 hour overtime = earn back 1 hour of PTO). At least I enjoy my work, and I’m finding trainings I can do when there’s not much extra work that needs doing, so working overtime isn’t so bad.

I figured that there probably wasn’t going to be anything to be done about my leave without pay so I’d just end up one full paycheck short this year, but as I was wrapping up my overtime for my PTO I got an email from payroll advising me that I could do overtime to earn back my leave without pay as well. Soon after, we were advised that we had until the end of June to finish earning back any time or pay that we wanted to recoup.

I worked out a schedule and found if I worked 8 extra hours per week I’d wrap up by the end of June, but I knew there would be at least one weekend where I’d be working extra no matter what to support our our system release. I also wanted to finish working overtime sooner rather than later so I’ve been working as much as I can as often as I can. I think last week I worked 66 hours in total, so, 26 hours of overtime last week alone; as of now I have 30 hours left to work of the original 80 hours of overtime.

But there’s also so many of my own things I want to do that I’ve effectively put off until the end of next month just so I can hurry up and finish my overtime work. No vegging out on the couch, no tinkering with my own software projects, no vacations. And while I could have done some of those on the weekends, my weekends during this time have been fun but also busy. There hasn’t been too much downtime in general these past few months.

Once this overtime work wraps up it’s going to feel weird having my work-life balance tip away from “work” and back towards “life”. I bet I’m not going to know what to do with myself, at least for a bit, but it’s going to be nice not having my schedule feel so full all time time.